An Ill Advised Invitation
by Dr. Jekyl
Summary: In which Shepard spies, lies and receives comeuppance served for two.


_Another prompt fill. Feedback, including concrit, is very much welcome!_

* * *

**An Ill-Advised Invitation**

"Commander Shepard, an asari matriarch is requesting permission to board. She says that you extended an invitation to her on our last visit to the Citadel."

"The Matriarch Aethyta. Let her in EDI," Shepard said with a grin that, she judged from her reflection, was perhaps a tad _too_evil (if such a thing were possible). "Get Traynor to give her the standard meet-and-greet. I'll be down to give her the rest of the tour in a few minutes."

She straightened the collar on her uniform jacket, humming slightly as she counted quietly under her breath.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One."

On cue, the door slid open and Liara burst into her quarters in a state of extreme agitation.

"Shepard, what are you doing? What is _she _doing here!?"

With some effort, Shepard managed to school her features into something approaching mild curiosity. She never got to surprise Liara anymore, huh? It had taken some doing, fair enough - working through various proxies, passing around hand-written notes, never revealing all of her agenda to a single person - but these were the steps one had to take when one's girlfriend was the all-seeing Shadow Broker.

The cloak-and-dagger stuff had actually proved to be surprisingly fun anyway, all that skulking about. It was good to have something even slightly silly to take her mind off of... everything else, if only for a little while.

"What do you mean?"

"Aethyta! She's-"

"Your father, I thought. "

"-a _spy _for the Asari government!"

"A rather disinterested one," Shepard countered smoothly, trying hard to keep her 'Commander Shepard' mask in place and not burst out laughing. Liara was entirely too cute when flustered. "Who's giving us Asari commandos. I don't think we've got anything to worry about. Besides, I thought you said that wanted to get to know her better."

If Liara was cute when she was flustered, she was adorable when she was pouting.

"On _my_ terms, Shepard. In my own time," Liara groaned and buried her head in her hands. "What if she _says _something?"

"'Says something' like what?"

"You weren't there. You didn't hear what she was saying about... us. And my mother."

"What, that Benezia had a great rack?"

If Liara was adorable when she was pouting, she was absolutely delectable when she was blushing. Her hands fell from her face and she stared at Shepard in horror, checks flushing an almost purple colour.

"What?! How did you-"

"Security vids," she shrugged and then smiled. "Being a Spectre has a few advantages."

"I- You- I can't believe you were... _spyin_g on me!"

"...says the Shadow Broker ironically."

And if she was delectable when blushing, it had nothing - absolutely nothing - on Liara when she was even mildly angry. It was something in her eyes, Shepard decided, or maybe the way she brought her chin up and clenched her fists and unconsciously charged her biotics. It sent a thrill through Shepard every time and caused heat to pool pleasantly in her belly. She'd always been drawn to danger, and Liara could radiate it like nobody's business.

"That's not fair! It's my job!"

"And it's _my _job to look out for you," Shepard countered, backing away with her hands upraised, placating. "Anyway, I thought it was cute."

"Cute? Me getting... unwanted sex advice from my father in a public bar was 'cute'?"

"Well, you are pretty cute when you blush. Reminds me of a shy archaeologist I fell for once."

Liara's mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds as she tried out various different responses for fit. In the end, she threw her arms up in exasperation, letting them fall back down to her sides with a heavy sigh.

"You really are terrible, you know?"

"I know. And I know that you love it," Shepard grinned, stepping forward to slip her arms around the asari's waist, attempting to pull her close. Liara rolled her eyes and braced her own arms against Shepard's shoulders, keeping enough distance between then to accurately convey her displeasure. "Anyway, you all you really have to do is say 'hi' and maybe show her where you work-"

"I can't just show her where I work!"

"Why not?"

"Shepard, she's a spy for the asari government and I'm the _Shadow Broker_," Liara replied in her 'you're being deliberately dense' voice. "The matriarchs threatened to have me killed when they thought I was just a garden-variety intel dealer, not the most wanted woman in the galaxy!"

"You honestly think she hasn't worked it out? You spend two years obsessing over the Shadow Broker," she said, ignoring Liara's wince, "then we tear up half of Nos Astra, go on a wild skycar chase and kill a Spectre so we can go haring off after him, then _you_ vanish to be presumed dead, only to re-appear months later, completely unscathed? Now, if _I _were spying on you, I'd guess that you'd either been bought out-"

"-or had taken his place. I know, I know. There are others who've made the connection. In hindsight, we were not as... discrete as we should have been, what, with the war and all. But suspecting something and getting _confirmation _of your suspicions are two very different things."

"Point taken," Shepard sighed. "So have a drink on the Port Ob. Deck then. Everyone who'd normally be using it should be out on the station getting scandalously drunk by now." When Liara still hesitated, she pulled out her trump card. "I hear she does a mean Hyetiana Sunsetter."

"Oh, fine," Liara huffed.

"That's my girl."

Liara rolled her eyes by allowed herself to be drawn into a kiss anyway, and they parted with the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"I'd better not regret this."

"Relax. It'll be fine." She released the asari with a wink and a light slap on her rump. "And we can do something tawdry later, hmm?"

"Terrible."

* * *

"So, I've always wondered... You know _Vaenia_, right?"

"Pfft. Who doesn't?"

Joker seemed surprised by the ready acknowledgement, but pressed ahead without missing a beat.

"Well, there's this one scene where-"

Shepard rolled her eyes as Joker continued to talk, and took a sip of her coffee. She'd never quite understood his fascination with Vaenia (aside from the obvious delight he took in trying to give her and Liara crap about it). Oh, it wasn't _bad_as porn went, they'd decided after they'd finally caved in and watched it together. In truth, it probably even fell into the realm of what would be described as 'tasteful erotica' rather than pornography. Unfortunately this meant that it wound up being a bit too arty and slow-paced for Shepard's liking, while Liara had spent almost the entire time dissecting the (numerous) plot-holes and belabouring the (rampant) scientific inaccuracies. The night would have been a total bust if not for the second-to-last set-piece, the one with the big biotics fight. There was just something about seeing about seeing two asari really going at each other's throats for the love of the human woman that spoke to them both.

Well, spoke to parts of them, anyway.

"-I mean, humans don't bend that way, and I didn't think asari did either."

"We don't. You know you can't believe what you see in the vids. Three quarters of the damn thing's CGI."

"Well, yeah, I suppose the bit where they're on the low-g planet and everything's, you know, _bouncing_-"

"Nah, that one's real."

"No way that could have been done without CG! I mean-"

"They added some stuff in post-production maybe - you know, all the glowy 'my mind's being blown by the sex' crap - but the chicks are real enough. 'had to tether two of the actresses together to stop them drifting off at one point when they got caught up in things."

A thoughtful pause.

"You seem... oddly well-informed on this subject."

"Well, I was there, wasn't I?"

The realisation hit both of the humans at the same time, in much the same way that Shepard's mouthful of coffee subsequently hit the wall opposite her.

"Wait: _you_ were _in _Vaenia?"

"Eh, it was just a bit part, and they cut most of it. Can't see much more than my ass really."

"No kidding! That is so awesome! So, which scene-"

"Joker, I think you've taken up enough of the matriarch's time," Shepard interrupted hastily, still struggling to regain her composure even as her mind skidded circles around the sudden, terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad truth. She and Liara had watched a porno that Liara's other parent was in it. Hells, they'd more than watched it, they'd - oh hell.

She was going to have to kill herself. That, or never meld with Liara again. It was the only way to keep the truth from her...

Oh hell.

Maybe this really wasn't such a good idea.

"Oh, it's no trouble," Aethyta responded, glancing over at her with a suspiciously knowing smile. "Always good to meet a human who doesn't have as many hang-ups as most of your kind. Start talking about sex with most of 'em and they start going a funny shade of red. Admit to watching a porno? They'd rather die."

Shepard, who was threatening to go a very funny shade of red indeed, made a masterful attempt at recovering her composure.

"Did Specialist Traynor give you the tour?"

"Yeah. Nice little ship you've got here, Shepard."

"'Little'?!" both she and Joker objected in unison. Aethyta, though, was unmoved.

"Two words for you: Destiny. Ascension. If you humans want to get in a dick-waving contest with the asari, you're going to have build something a whole lot bigger than this tin can."

"I didn't think asari had dicks," Joker shot back immediately. "Being an all-female species and all."

"_Mono-gendered _species, asswipe. We don't do 'male' and 'female'. And you must not be watching the right vids."

That gave even Joker pause.

"Wait, what?"

"I think we'll just leave that one right there," Shepard said quickly, grabbing the matriarch's arm and starting to haul her away from the cockpit before any more damage could be done. "Liara's down on one of the observation decks. She'll want to say hi before you go."

"So, this tour thing is really just an excuse to force the kid to see me again?" the matriarch said, sounding slightly miffed. "You coulda just asked straight up."

"I wanted to surprise her," Shepard admitted with a shrug as she led the way through the CIC to the elevator. "But that's only part of it. I need to ask you something, and I didn't want to do it on the Citadel. Too many ears."

Aethyta gave her a funny look as the doors closed behind them.

"This isn't going to be one of those weird human bonding things, is it? You're both adults. More or less. You don't need my permission to do anything."

"What? No! No, nothing like that," Shepard assured her once she'd worked out what the matriarch meant. They'd joked about marriage and kids before, she and Liara, but it had been just that - jokes. Even thinking about it now, the prospect seemed kind of surreal. It was the sort of thing normal people did, not them. "No, I wanted to know if the asari really have the ability to build new mass relays."

The surprise on Aethyta's face was completely unfeigned.

"You remember that?"

Shepard shrugged as the doors slid back open again and they stepped out onto the crew deck. Garrus waved lazily at them from where he and Tali were having lunch, but the rest of the level seemed deserted, as she'd expected it to be.

"I try to pay attention when people tell me interesting things. I don't ask all of those questions just for the sake of it."

"Well, yeah, we've had the know-how to make new relays for centuries," Aethyta said slowly as they came to a halt outside the observation deck's door. "Even if we still don't know how to make that damn alloy they used. There are substitutes though. Probably won't last as long as the originals, but long enough. The trouble's not knowing how to build one, though."

"No?"

The old asari shook her head slightly.

"Nope. First, you've got to find some way to tie it into the Citadel's control grid to sync with the other relays. That, or build an entirely new control system. Doable, in theory, but no-one's ever really looked too much into it. But the real kick in the quad's the expense. We're talking _trillions_of credits here to build a single new relay. Enough to bankrupt most system governments."

"Would it be more expensive than letting the Reapers win?"

"When you put it like that... no. But what could you use new relays for?"

Shepard smiled grimly.

"If all else fails, I want to blow some of the old ones up."

The look Aethyta gave her this time suggested that she was torn between awe, horror and deciding that the human was utterly, irrevocably crazy.

"Well, fuck me sideways," she breathed after a long beat. "All or nothing, huh?"

Shepard nodded, but didn't let her determined expression waver.

"Can you look into it for me? On the down-low?"

"Yeah," Aethyta said slowly. "Yeah. I can do that."

"Good. Thanks. And now," she said, palming the door control, "I think Liara's waiting for you. I'll see you again on the way out."

* * *

"So, are you two kids getting on ok?" Aethyta asked when the three of them stood, somewhat awkwardly, at the airlock door.

Shepard glanced over at Liara who shrugged.

"Fine. I guess."

"Just 'fine'. Really?"

"We're in the middle of a war, father," Liara chimed in, with a hint of exasperation. "It's not exactly conducive to building a relationship. We make do as best we can."

There was a lengthy pause as Aethyta looked from one of them to the other. Then she sighed.

"Look, I wasn't going to say anything, but you're both looking kind of stressed, so I'd say 'making do' isn't cutting it. You two need to fuck more."

Liara made a kind of strangled, choking sound, but Shepard didn't dare turn enough to see her expression.

"I beg your pardon?" she said, finding her voice after quite a few seconds spent doing a rather admirable goldfish impression.

"Stress relief. Fighting and fucking are the two good old standbys. Since the fighting thing's probably what's making you stressed, you should look into fucking."

The silence this time was even more pronounced.

"You _are_having sex regularly, right?" Aethyta prompted.

More silence. Shepard's cheeks and neck had gone horribly hot.

"Goddess, it's not like I'm asking if you do her up the ass! Not that there's anything wrong with that if you are. Are. You. Having. Sex. Regularly."

Liara did her own goldfish impression before finally finding her voice.

"I honestly don't see what business it is of yours."

"Then you've been spending too much time around humans, kid. They're rubbing off on you, when you" she pointed at Liara, "should be rubbing off on her." She pointed at Shepard. The pair of them followed the movement of the digit as though hypnotised. "Anyway, you're my daughter, which makes it my business. Your mother would have agreed."

"Benezia-"

"-was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it, in the bedroom and out of it. Taught me a thing or two, and I had over two hundred years on her. Speaking of which, important lesson here: sex on the beach sounds all romantic and crap, but it's really just a recipe for getting sand in uncomfortable places."

"I believe I've said before that you don't need to tell me every detail," Liara groaned, covering her face with one of her hands.

"Um. Yes. Thank you. For that important tidbit," Shepard said weakly. She'd wished, before, that she didn't have such a vivid imagination; she'd never wished that she didn't have an imagination _at all_until now, however.

Aethyta rolled her eyes at the pair of them and sighed.

"I've got plenty more where that came from. Answer my question or you're going to start hearing them."

"That's... blackmail!" Liara exclaimed.

"It's _effective_is what it is. Now, there was this one time, not long after we first met-"

"Goddess! Fine!" Liara hissed, throwing her hands up in the air. "Yes, we are, but, to forestall your next question, no, it's not as often as I'd like! Happy?"

"No," Aethyta said evenly, crossing her arms across her chest. "Are you?"

There was another pause as Shepard and Liara looked at each other through the pink mists of mutual embarrassment. They were down to about once a week, which wasn't nearly as often as Shepard would have liked either. Worse, as the war had progressed and their workloads had grown, their couplings had become increasingly quick and frantic rather than the slow, playful exchanges that had previously characterised their relationship. It wasn't that Shepard was _opposed_to rough-and-ready, no-time-to-undress-properly, up-against-the-bulkhead sex - quite the contrary, really - but variety was nice. And, in any case, Shepard found that that sort of sex was much better when an interruption was only a possibility, not a certainty.

Liara's eyes dropped. Her shoulders sagged slightly.

"No," Shepard admitted for them both, running her hands through her hair. "Not really."

"We're fighting a war, father," Liara sighed, looking back up. "There's just... so much to do, and so little time to do it. Between fighting the Reapers, rescuing refugees and negotiating alliances, I'm just lucky if Shepard goes to bed at all most nights," she added, sending a reproachful look her way.

"You're one to talk, miss 'I can get by on two hours a night and a handful of stims for weeks on end'." Shepard's look, she knew, was at least equally, if not more reproachful. She worried that Liara worked even harder than she did. Hadn't that part of the point to inviting Aethyta onboard? To force Liara out from behind her terminals, to unwind, a little bit? And the faffing about and skulduggery to get it organised in the first place had been the little break she, herself had needed.

"So you're not sleeping, not fucking _and_not talking to each other," Aethyta said, casting her eyes skyward. "Goddess, we're all doomed."

"What?"

"Never mind. Look," the matriarch sighed, "we've identified some problems here. The question is: what are you gonna do about them?"

They stared at her blankly. Shepard, at least, was completely at a loss for a reply. Liara was right: they just didn't have time. She couldn't neglect her responsibilities to her people, to the war effort, to the rest of her crew, just because she wanted to spend more time with her lover. They'd make do. And when the war was over...

"Nothing? You're a smart kid, and you're Commander fucking Shepard. You should be able to come up with _something_. No?" The increasingly exasperated matriarch rolled her eyes again. "Do you share a bed?"

Liara shook her head.

"Well, why the hell not?"

"It'd be unprofessional," Shepard replied instantly, finally back on firm ground. It _would_be unprofessional even if it wasn't, strictly speaking, against regs. They'd both agreed on that at the outset. They had to work together, fight beside each other and couldn't let their relationship interfere. There had to be boundaries.

"No, bending her over the map interface and fucking her senseless while that cute little specialist watches would be _unprofessional_," Aethyta said, leaving no doubt which side of the family Liara had gotten her 'talking to idiots' voice from. "Sharing a bed would be sensible."

"It's different with humans," Shepard said stiffly, keenly aware that the blush had returned in full force.

"It's not that different. I've been with humans. You're a social species," she said, pointing at Shepard again, "and we're a communal one. Share a bed. You'll both be happier for it, unless one of you snores. Share your showers too. If soaping each other up in the morning doesn't get you in a lather, there's something seriously wrong. Share meals. Set aside at least an hour each day where you're uncontactable and talk or fuck or sleep or do whatever as long as it's not work."

"But we can't just-" Liara started, stopped, and then tried again. "I mean, we have responsibilities."

"Damn straight you do. You have a _responsibility_to keep yourselves fighting fit and sane." When neither of them made a move to reply, she cast her hands up in exasperation. "Athame's tits, I shouldn't have to be telling you this! This is all basic stuff. I should be giving you gift cards for This One's Intimate Apparel and telling you how to do that thing with your biotics that makes your tongue vibrate," she said and paused, her expression softening somewhat. "Your mother used to love that one."

Liara covered her face with her hand again.

"Enough," she said.

"I mean, _really_-"

"Enough!" Liara said, rather more firmly, letting her hand drop to point accusingly at her father. "You're doing this on purpose now!"

"Maybe a little," Aethyta said with a smirk and a twinkle in her eye. "You make it too easy, kid. But, in all seriousness, you two think about what I said. Make time. Don't feel guilty for taking care of yourselves. Do that, and I promise I'll keep the vids of the extranet."

The look of utter horror on Liara's face would have been funny in virtually any other circumstance.

"Vids?" she whispered.

Aethyta's smirk became a grin and a wink as she stepped back through the airlock door.

"Seeya babe."

The door slid shut with a hiss, leaving the two of them to stare, unseeing, at it in the hot, embarrassed silence.

"Shepard-"

"Don't think about it," Shepard ordered, her mind immediately flying back to Vaenia. She pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. "Just... don't think about it."

The silence between them became a little more hot and a little more embarrassed when there was a little cough from behind them.

The blood froze in Shepard's veins. Liara buried her face in her hands.

Oh no. Oh no no no.

When she turned around, she was confronted by Lieutenant Commander Ashley Williams, the second human Spectre, dressed for a night out on the town and clearly trying not to laugh behind her upraised hand. At her side was Specialist Samantha Traynor, who trying and failing spectacularly to look guilty behind her own blush. And there were Gabby and Ken, also, prepped for some R&R, and, oh, and Ensign Chen and the rest of the skeleton CIC crew. And, of course, the set wouldn't be complete without-

"_That_ was Liara's other parent?" Joker said, sticking his head around the bulkhead to grin at them both. "Oh, this is just _too_ good."


End file.
